As an advocate of fusing traditional PR and social media, Quest PR works with a select  number of fantastic partners who champion social media and help small and medium sized companies to grow. Joanne Ernst is our special guest at our September 7 seminar where she will demystify Search Engine Optimisation and provide tips on what to do and what not do. To book your place on the seminar please email charlotte@quest-pr.com.

If you’re unable to attend, here’s a preview of her tips below:

Search Engine Optimisation can seem like a bit of a black art to the uninitiated, so the purpose of this short article is to dispel that myth and give you some pragmatic tips you can use to quickly boost your website’s ranking. 

1. First things first – ensure you are crystal clear on what your keywords and keyword phrases are. (Google’s free keyword tool is great, or you can get more in depth analysis from www.wordtracker.com). As well as being a good fit for your business, choose keywords that get searched for a lot (‘search traffic’) yet have a fairly low level of competition.|
2. Then review your current website and web presence with respect to your prioritised keyword phrases.  Are the phrases already in your text on your website? Make sure you’re consistent in your spelling of your chosen keywords and that phrases appear in full.
3. If you have a blog, use your keyword phrases as blog post titles and in the posts. Even better would be to have short video blogs (vlogs) using your keyword phrases – google loves video!
4. Ensure your keywords and keyword phrases are listed as html meta- tags as well.  That might sound complicated, but honestly it is literally a 10 minute job of typing the keywords into the appropriate place in your html code, or with www.Wordpress.org  you can do it with a simple SEO widget.
5. Another tactic is to use keywords in your domain name itself.  (Don’t worry, you don’t need to create a new site on this domain or change your existing one over. Just secure the keyword-rich domain name and forward it to your existing site)
6. Last but certainly not least, is off-page optimisation. That simply means the things you do elsewhere to build links back to your website. One example would be publishing articles using an online directory such as www.ezine-articles.com and using the keywords as the anchor text that hyperlinks back to your website.
7. Another example is … to do guest blog posts!

Joanne Ernst of Online-Catalyst.com   is a professional coach and project manager who helps business owners and entrepreneurs to establish an online presence. If you’ve found these seven tips useful, head to http://www.online-catalyst.com and download her free 21 Strategies to Boost Your Online Profile report.

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